THERE IS OIL IN THE GROUND
The Netflix studios at Fort Monmouth, the gold rush it ignites, and the warning we cannot afford to forget.
Written by Adam Nelson, Co-Founder, Socko!
Photography by Workhouse
Cover: Fort Monmouth Construction of Netflix first sound stage
There is a field in Monmouth County where nineteen-year-old boys used to learn how to send a signal through the air and pray it reached the other side. They trained with pigeons first, then with radio, then with the thing that would become radar, which they invented here, on this dirt, in these buildings, with their hands and their fear and the full weight of the United States government pressing down on their shoulders. The Signal Corps bounced the first electronic signal off the surface of the moon from this ground. They built the walkie-talkie on this ground. They bred four hundred homing pigeons a season and trained a falcon named Thunderbolt to kill the enemy’s birds in midair, and when the New York Times asked the officer in charge if the falcon would have knives strapped to its claws he said, and I am quoting a man from 1941, “It’s something far more explosive than that.”
That was Fort Monmouth. That was a hundred years of American invention packed into 1,126 acres between the Shrewsbury River and Route 35, five miles from the Atlantic Ocean, ten minutes from Long Branch, an hour from Manhattan, and as far from Hollywood as the moon they once pinged with a radar dish the size of a house
In 2005, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission ordered Fort Monmouth shut down. It took six years to die. The final closure ceremony was held on September 15, 2011, and after that, silence. Eleven years of silence. The buildings emptied out. The barracks went dark. Weeds came up through the concrete. Windows broke and nobody fixed them. The stairwells where those nineteen-year-old boys ran drills collected dust and rain and the particular quiet that settles into a place when the government is done with it. The towns around the base, Eatontown, Tinton Falls, Oceanport, lost jobs, lost tax revenue, lost the steady pulse of a military installation that had been pumping life into Monmouth County since before their grandparents were born. People drove past on Route 35 and looked at the fence and thought, that is never coming back. The pigeons were long gone. The moon was still up there, but nobody at Fort Monmouth was listening for the bounce anymore.
And then, in December 2022, Netflix was announced as the winning bidder for 292 acres of it. In May 2025, they broke ground. In December 2025, they closed the purchase, $55 million for the land, a billion dollars committed to what goes on top of it.
Then the bulldozers came.
That was Fort Monmouth. That was a hundred years of American invention packed into 1,126 acres between the Shrewsbury River and Route 35, five miles from the Atlantic Ocean, ten minutes from Long Branch, an hour from Manhattan, and as far from Hollywood as the moon they once pinged with a radar dish the size of a house
In 2005, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission ordered Fort Monmouth shut down. It took six years to die. The final closure ceremony was held on September 15, 2011, and after that, silence. Eleven years of silence. The buildings emptied out. The barracks went dark. Weeds came up through the concrete. Windows broke and nobody fixed them. The stairwells where those nineteen-year-old boys ran drills collected dust and rain and the particular quiet that settles into a place when the government is done with it. The towns around the base, Eatontown, Tinton Falls, Oceanport, lost jobs, lost tax revenue, lost the steady pulse of a military installation that had been pumping life into Monmouth County since before their grandparents were born. People drove past on Route 35 and looked at the fence and thought, that is never coming back. The pigeons were long gone. The moon was still up there, but nobody at Fort Monmouth was listening for the bounce anymore.
And then, in December 2022, Netflix was announced as the winning bidder for 292 acres of it. In May 2025, they broke ground. In December 2025, they closed the purchase, $55 million for the land, a billion dollars committed to what goes on top of it.
Then the bulldozers came.
THE TORCH
I want you to look at the photographs in this story. I want you to look at them closely because what you are seeing is not construction. What you are seeing is an exhumation.
The dirt has been turned. The cement entrails of those former stairwells, the ones where boys in khakis ran up and down in the simulation of urgency that precedes the real thing, those stairwells have been jackhammered into rubble and hauled off in trucks. The twisted rebar sticks out of the slabs like broken ribs. Steel beams are going in where barracks used to stand. Cranes swing over ground that hasn’t felt weight like this since the Second World War, when 19,786 enlisted men slept here and 21,033 new second lieutenants graduated from the Officer Candidate School and walked off this base into the mouths of Europe and the Pacific.
That ground is being opened again. Not for war this time. For pictures.
The cranes are up. The beams are going in. A ten-minute drive from the beach. And underneath all of it, underneath the concrete and the steel and the money and the ambition, there is something else, something you cannot see in the photographs but you can feel if you stand on the site long enough and let the wind come off the Shrewsbury and hit you in the face.
There is oil in the ground.
I want you to look at the photographs in this story. I want you to look at them closely because what you are seeing is not construction. What you are seeing is an exhumation.
The dirt has been turned. The cement entrails of those former stairwells, the ones where boys in khakis ran up and down in the simulation of urgency that precedes the real thing, those stairwells have been jackhammered into rubble and hauled off in trucks. The twisted rebar sticks out of the slabs like broken ribs. Steel beams are going in where barracks used to stand. Cranes swing over ground that hasn’t felt weight like this since the Second World War, when 19,786 enlisted men slept here and 21,033 new second lieutenants graduated from the Officer Candidate School and walked off this base into the mouths of Europe and the Pacific.
That ground is being opened again. Not for war this time. For pictures.
The cranes are up. The beams are going in. A ten-minute drive from the beach. And underneath all of it, underneath the concrete and the steel and the money and the ambition, there is something else, something you cannot see in the photographs but you can feel if you stand on the site long enough and let the wind come off the Shrewsbury and hit you in the face.
There is oil in the ground.
THE HOOPLA
The metaphor is not accidental. This is a There Will Be Blood moment for the state of New Jersey, and if you have seen that film you know what I mean by it, and if you have not seen that film go see it and come back, because what is happening at Fort Monmouth is the same story Daniel Plainview told that congregation in the church, the same promise, the same peril, the same gusher of greatness rising out of dirt that everybody forgot was sitting on top of something.
Be fruitful and multiply. That is what the proverb says. And now it is coming to pass.
The numbers have been published everywhere and I am not going to recite them like a stockbroker, because SOCKO! does not do that, but I will tell you the headline that the Hollywood Reporter ran this month and let it sit in your lap: every major film market in America went down in Q1 2026 except New Jersey. California down. New York down. Georgia down. New Jersey up. Our filming count was up by 45 percent. Our production spending by 37 percent. The only state in the country moving in the right direction while the rest of the industry is trying to figure out which direction the right direction even is.
That is the gusher. That is the bubbling crude. That is the bounty springing underfoot, and Fort Monmouth is the derrick.
But here is the thing about oil booms, and gold rushes, and every other strike in the history of American capitalism that has ever turned a forgotten piece of land into the center of the known universe.
They make people comfortable. And comfortable is the enemy.
The metaphor is not accidental. This is a There Will Be Blood moment for the state of New Jersey, and if you have seen that film you know what I mean by it, and if you have not seen that film go see it and come back, because what is happening at Fort Monmouth is the same story Daniel Plainview told that congregation in the church, the same promise, the same peril, the same gusher of greatness rising out of dirt that everybody forgot was sitting on top of something.
Be fruitful and multiply. That is what the proverb says. And now it is coming to pass.
The numbers have been published everywhere and I am not going to recite them like a stockbroker, because SOCKO! does not do that, but I will tell you the headline that the Hollywood Reporter ran this month and let it sit in your lap: every major film market in America went down in Q1 2026 except New Jersey. California down. New York down. Georgia down. New Jersey up. Our filming count was up by 45 percent. Our production spending by 37 percent. The only state in the country moving in the right direction while the rest of the industry is trying to figure out which direction the right direction even is.
That is the gusher. That is the bubbling crude. That is the bounty springing underfoot, and Fort Monmouth is the derrick.
But here is the thing about oil booms, and gold rushes, and every other strike in the history of American capitalism that has ever turned a forgotten piece of land into the center of the known universe.
They make people comfortable. And comfortable is the enemy.
THE BROUHAHA
Let me tell you what I am afraid of, because somebody has to say it out loud and it might as well be our magazine that just put a baby goddess of entertainment on its cover and promised to tell the truth about this industry even when the truth is inconvenient.
I am afraid of the victory lap. I am afraid of the ribbon cutting and the champagne and the governor at the podium and the press release that says, “Mission Accomplished.” I am afraid that we will look at the cranes over Fort Monmouth and the steel going into Newark and the concrete drying in Bayonne and we will say, we did it, and then we will sit down. And the sitting down is where the dying starts.
We are living through a moment when the pace of technology is moving so fast that entire generations are being left behind, not because they are not equipped, not because they are lazy, but because nobody is teaching them. Artificial intelligence is rewriting every job description in every industry on the planet and the people who do not understand what a prompt is, the people who cannot comprehend a world where a machine writes the first draft and a human writes the second, those people are being told in a thousand ways that they are finished. That their skills are antique. That their experience is a liability.
That is a lie. And the film industry is the place where we can prove it is a lie.
Because film is one of the last industries on earth where a sixty-two-year-old woman who has been hemming scrims for thirty years is more valuable than any algorithm that has ever been written. Where a fifty-eight-year-old grip who knows how to rig a wall spread in the dark is worth more than a terabyte of training data. Where a kid from Ho-Ho-Kus who has never held a bounce board and a grandmother from Parsippany who has never seen a call sheet can sit in the same classroom and learn the same trade and walk onto the same set and do the same work and feed the same family.
That is what this moment is. That is what Fort Monmouth is. A chance to build something that every other industry in America has failed to build, which is a workforce that does not leave anyone behind.
Let me tell you what I am afraid of, because somebody has to say it out loud and it might as well be our magazine that just put a baby goddess of entertainment on its cover and promised to tell the truth about this industry even when the truth is inconvenient.
I am afraid of the victory lap. I am afraid of the ribbon cutting and the champagne and the governor at the podium and the press release that says, “Mission Accomplished.” I am afraid that we will look at the cranes over Fort Monmouth and the steel going into Newark and the concrete drying in Bayonne and we will say, we did it, and then we will sit down. And the sitting down is where the dying starts.
We are living through a moment when the pace of technology is moving so fast that entire generations are being left behind, not because they are not equipped, not because they are lazy, but because nobody is teaching them. Artificial intelligence is rewriting every job description in every industry on the planet and the people who do not understand what a prompt is, the people who cannot comprehend a world where a machine writes the first draft and a human writes the second, those people are being told in a thousand ways that they are finished. That their skills are antique. That their experience is a liability.
That is a lie. And the film industry is the place where we can prove it is a lie.
Because film is one of the last industries on earth where a sixty-two-year-old woman who has been hemming scrims for thirty years is more valuable than any algorithm that has ever been written. Where a fifty-eight-year-old grip who knows how to rig a wall spread in the dark is worth more than a terabyte of training data. Where a kid from Ho-Ho-Kus who has never held a bounce board and a grandmother from Parsippany who has never seen a call sheet can sit in the same classroom and learn the same trade and walk onto the same set and do the same work and feed the same family.
That is what this moment is. That is what Fort Monmouth is. A chance to build something that every other industry in America has failed to build, which is a workforce that does not leave anyone behind.
THE POUR
The steel is going in right now. I need you to understand that sentence literally. Right now. As you read this, or scroll it on your phone, there are ironworkers at Fort Monmouth driving rivets into beams that will hold up walls that will hold up lights that will illuminate sets where actors will stand and cameras will roll and the next great American movie will be made, and it will be made in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and the kid who works the craft services table on that set will live in Secaucus and the woman who manages the production office will live in Perth Amboy and the gaffer who rigs the overheads will live in Mahwah and every single one of their paychecks will go back into this economy like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward in every direction.
One rivet at a time. That is how you build a soundstage. One rivet at a time is also how you build an economy, and a workforce, and a future, and a state that finally gets to stop apologizing for losing its film industry to California.
The former Army base that invented radar is about to become a place where simulated wars are fought on soundstages through the magic of a Jersey-operated camera. Where the same ground that prepared boys for combat will prepare those stories for screens. Where the dirt that held up barracks will hold up backlots. The ghosts of the Signal Corps are not rolling over in their graves. They are sitting up. They are paying attention. They recognize what is happening because they did it first, on this same ground, with the same energy, for the same reason: because somebody looked at a piece of New Jersey dirt and said, there is something here, and I am going to pull it out.
The steel is going in right now. I need you to understand that sentence literally. Right now. As you read this, or scroll it on your phone, there are ironworkers at Fort Monmouth driving rivets into beams that will hold up walls that will hold up lights that will illuminate sets where actors will stand and cameras will roll and the next great American movie will be made, and it will be made in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and the kid who works the craft services table on that set will live in Secaucus and the woman who manages the production office will live in Perth Amboy and the gaffer who rigs the overheads will live in Mahwah and every single one of their paychecks will go back into this economy like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward in every direction.
One rivet at a time. That is how you build a soundstage. One rivet at a time is also how you build an economy, and a workforce, and a future, and a state that finally gets to stop apologizing for losing its film industry to California.
The former Army base that invented radar is about to become a place where simulated wars are fought on soundstages through the magic of a Jersey-operated camera. Where the same ground that prepared boys for combat will prepare those stories for screens. Where the dirt that held up barracks will hold up backlots. The ghosts of the Signal Corps are not rolling over in their graves. They are sitting up. They are paying attention. They recognize what is happening because they did it first, on this same ground, with the same energy, for the same reason: because somebody looked at a piece of New Jersey dirt and said, there is something here, and I am going to pull it out.
THE PIPELINE
A billion dollars of studio does not mean a thing if there is nobody to staff it. A hundred soundstages do not mean a thing if the people who walk onto them do not know the difference between a C-stand and a coat rack. Twelve stages at Fort Monmouth will need production coordinators, production accountants, location managers, hair and makeup artists, costumers, set dressers, scenic painters, grips, electricians, editors, sound mixers, colorists, caterers, drivers, and a thousand other pairs of hands that nobody puts on a poster but everybody needs on a Monday morning at six a.m. when the first AD calls places.
If we do this right, if we train the workforce before the doors open instead of scrambling to find warm bodies after, then Fort Monmouth is not just a studio. It is the engine of a new worker aristocracy in a state that has always celebrated its blue blood under its blue collar.
That is the promise. But the promise is only as good as the training, and the training is only as good as the people who build it, and the people who build it have to understand that this is not a job-placement program, this is not a checkbox on a grant application, this is the single greatest workforce opportunity this state has seen since the Signal Corps showed up in Little Silver in 1917 and started building the future with their hands.
The chasm between the haves and the have-nots in this country has grown so wide that most people cannot see the other side anymore. Fort Monmouth is a bridge. Not a metaphorical bridge, not an inspirational bridge, an actual, physical, steel-and-concrete bridge between a person who has never been on a set and a person who works on one every day. The training has to be real. The local placement has to be real. The commitment has to outlast the ceremony and the press conference and the first, second, and third time somebody in Trenton suggests cutting the budget.
Because if we build the studios but do not build the people, we will have done exactly what every other gold rush in American history has done, which is make a small number of people very rich and leave everybody else standing in the dirt wondering what happened.
A billion dollars of studio does not mean a thing if there is nobody to staff it. A hundred soundstages do not mean a thing if the people who walk onto them do not know the difference between a C-stand and a coat rack. Twelve stages at Fort Monmouth will need production coordinators, production accountants, location managers, hair and makeup artists, costumers, set dressers, scenic painters, grips, electricians, editors, sound mixers, colorists, caterers, drivers, and a thousand other pairs of hands that nobody puts on a poster but everybody needs on a Monday morning at six a.m. when the first AD calls places.
If we do this right, if we train the workforce before the doors open instead of scrambling to find warm bodies after, then Fort Monmouth is not just a studio. It is the engine of a new worker aristocracy in a state that has always celebrated its blue blood under its blue collar.
That is the promise. But the promise is only as good as the training, and the training is only as good as the people who build it, and the people who build it have to understand that this is not a job-placement program, this is not a checkbox on a grant application, this is the single greatest workforce opportunity this state has seen since the Signal Corps showed up in Little Silver in 1917 and started building the future with their hands.
The chasm between the haves and the have-nots in this country has grown so wide that most people cannot see the other side anymore. Fort Monmouth is a bridge. Not a metaphorical bridge, not an inspirational bridge, an actual, physical, steel-and-concrete bridge between a person who has never been on a set and a person who works on one every day. The training has to be real. The local placement has to be real. The commitment has to outlast the ceremony and the press conference and the first, second, and third time somebody in Trenton suggests cutting the budget.
Because if we build the studios but do not build the people, we will have done exactly what every other gold rush in American history has done, which is make a small number of people very rich and leave everybody else standing in the dirt wondering what happened.
THE STATE OF THE STATE
It is springtime now.
The oil is in the ground. The gusher is coming.
This is our moonshot. The kind of bet a state makes once, if it is lucky. The kind of bet that changes what the land is for, what the people are for, what the name on the map means to the rest of the country when they hear it spoken out loud.
The winter on this plot of earth was long. The silence there lasted eleven years. But silence was not death. Silence was a seed waiting for the season to turn.
Well, the season has turned.
One rivet at a time.
An entire industry is in bloom in the State of New Jersey.
It is springtime now.
The oil is in the ground. The gusher is coming.
This is our moonshot. The kind of bet a state makes once, if it is lucky. The kind of bet that changes what the land is for, what the people are for, what the name on the map means to the rest of the country when they hear it spoken out loud.
The winter on this plot of earth was long. The silence there lasted eleven years. But silence was not death. Silence was a seed waiting for the season to turn.
Well, the season has turned.
One rivet at a time.
An entire industry is in bloom in the State of New Jersey.
❖ ❖ ❖
This story appeared in the inaugural issue of Socko! Magazine [May, 2026]. Click here to subscribe
Adam Nelson has lived at the intersection of performance and American storytelling for more than three decades. As the founder of Workhouse, the New York public relations agency he has run since 1999, he has built an award-winning firm representing filmmakers, artists, festivals, and cultural institutions. A professor at the New Jersey Film Academy, he is currently training a new generation for the state's rapidly expanding production economy. His film Food for Thought, directed by Gary Hanna, was a finalist at the AP'N3 Film Challenge and went on to win Best Silent Film at the 2026 Absurd Film Festival in Milan. Huckleberry Jim, his debut novel, is querying literary agents now. Nelson is co-founder of SOCKO! Magazine
